In a large scale project, such as managing of an oil drill site or management of a large construction project, the project can be split into a number of different, but related, tasks. Each task may have different inputs, outputs, deadlines, criteria and lifespans. As such, a task is typically managed by a separate process. Different systems may be used to manage each task with separate entities responsible for each task. An entity may or may not be related to other entities in other tasks. Further, within each task a collection of different sub-systems (even paper-based data) may funnel data to the central management system for the task.
Many large corporate environments have information that is duplicated across many data sources. There are many solutions available when it comes to dealing with managing documents, but support for the on-going reconciliation of data stored in databases is very limited and the typical solutions require extensive manual synchronization processes or an expensive process of replacement and consolidation.
Frequently, data is applied to two or more tasks during the project (e.g. the target completion date for the project). When a task has “control” or superior rights to the data and the task determines that the data has changed, an updated version of the data needs to be provided to all tasks in the system that use the data. As an example, development and operation and an oil well site has several different tasks and issues, including: planning and approval (e.g. drill site approval, land access management, etc.), drilling and construction, production and regulatory (e.g. energy utility board, environmental approval, zoning approval, etc.). Typically, the planning task manages the processes for obtaining the required land access approvals for a proposed drilling site. After approval(s) are obtained and after completion of construction of the site, the actual production of may deviate from the original projected date. As such, the original regulatory approval(s) may (or may not) need to be updated. Similarly, land access rights may (or may not) need to be revisited.
Prior art data management systems do not effectively deal with managing data from different tasks. Some prior art management systems impose a data monitor with data write capabilities over the systems that they monitor. While some data write capabilities may be useful in certain circumstances, providing such capabilities introduce issues with ensuring that data management system properly interfaces with and updates the data of the local system and that the management system has the appropriate data privileges to update the data.